The Real “Tower of David”

The most recent episode of “Homeland” took Brody to Venezuela. In the episode, “The Tower of David,” our pale-skinned hero is seen in custody, shaven-headed and gutshot, during a rendezvous on Venezuela’s jungle coastline, where one group of gun-wielding malandros (villains) hand him over to another. Brody, in a delirious state of writhing agony, lying in the back of a pickup, is driven to Caracas and into one of South America’s most apocalyptic urban fastnesses, the Tower of David.

The Tower is a half-finished forty-five-story skyscraper-cum-ghetto that rises from the heart of downtown Caracas. Home to over three thousand people who have built brick shacks inside its concrete carapace—right up to the twenty-eighth floor—the Tower is controlled by a group of malandros led by the born-again ex-convict Alexander (El Niño) Daza. In “Homeland,” Brody is made a guest and a prisoner of El Niño (The Boy), who finds a doctor to heal his wounds and assigns a girl to watch over him. In real life, as in “Homeland,” the Tower is a symbol of contemporary Venezuela’s broken dreams and, more pointedly, of the failure of the late Hugo Chávez’s experiment in socialism, which he called his “Bolivarian revolution.”

The building and its occupants were the subject of a story I wrote earlier this year, titled “Slumlord.” At the time, the bombastic Chávez, who was fifty-eight years-old and had recently won reëlection to Venezuela’s Presidency after nearly fourteen years in office, was still alive but concealed from public view, as he succumbed to cancer. He eventually died on March 5th, and was succeeded in office by his Vice-President, Nicolás Maduro.

The Tower, originally conceived of as the centerpiece of Venezuelan’s answer to Wall Street in the once economically dynamic, oil-rich nation, began construction in 1990. It was the brainchild of David Brillembourg, an investor who died in 1993, before the Tower was finished. Shortly afterward, there was a devastating Venezuelan financial crisis, and construction never resumed. The Tower of David, sixty-per-cent complete, became a derelict edifice. In 2007, El Niño Daza, together with several other armed gangsters and several hundred civilian followers, invaded the building and took it over. Daza has lived there ever since, ruling it like a private fiefdom. His authority, in a sense, is a by-product of the Chávez revolution; indeed, Daza was one of Chávez’s ardent supporters.

There are some inevitable discrepancies as well as uncanny parallels between real life and the show’s fictional representation. In the “Homeland” episode, El Niño is a strutting, grinning archetypal bad guy, with a big spider tattooed on his neck. The real El Niño Daza is clean-cut, and if he has tattoos they are hidden; he carries a Bible and frequently quotes from it. But early on in his control of the Tower there were murders of rivals, and a number of those killed were cut up and thrown off of high stories, just as men are ritually executed in Venezuela’s prisons, where he spent much of his life. In “Homeland,” Brody is shown who is boss when El Niño’s goons grab a man accused of stealing Brody’s passport and hurl him to his death from an upper floor. In both “Homeland” and real life, the Tower’s open floors look out across a city of smaller towers, overshadowed by mountains. There are goons everywhere and people watching. When Brody tries to make a run for it, he is stopped by armed men on the ground floor. There is no escape from the Tower of David in “Homeland.” In real life, there are sentinels on duty and an electric gated entrance, guarded by El Niño Daza’s people.

During Chávez’s tenure, Venezuela enjoyed a cash bonanza, thanks to the global spike in oil prices. Chávez used much of the surplus to fund a range of poverty-alleviation programs, encompassing health care, education, and subsidized-food distribution. Many of these programs have been administered by Cuban teachers, doctors, and other specialists, in an arrangement that Chávez came to with Fidel Castro. Though Chávez’s initiatives were well-intended, and ultimately brought up the basic standard of living of poor Venezuelans, many of them were inefficient, dogged by inept planning and administration, and by corruption. The government’s housing program, in particular, was abysmal, and by the mid-aughts numerous invasions of unoccupied buildings as well as vacant lots were taking place around Caracas—in some cases, by organized groups of squatters led by criminals, who then took over the properties and charged the other occupants rent and protection money. The government, for the most part, looked the other way.

At the end of last year, there were an estimated hundred and fifty-five “invaded” buildings in downtown Caracas—including an entire shopping mall. It was a situation that the government had shown little willpower to do anything about. The poverty, chronic housing shortage, and government compliance with many of the invasiones, combined with a dramatic breakdown in law enforcement and security, had created a dystopian atmosphere in Caracas—with the Tower of David as the most visible symbol of Venezuela’s mess. In 2011, the murder rate in the Capital District of Caracas was a hundred and twenty-two per hundred thousand inhabitants, one of the highest in Latin America. Meanwhile, most of the country’s overflowing prisons are controlled by the criminals who are imprisoned in them, and who guard their way of life—and the criminal rackets they run from their sanctuaries—with armed men. It is much the same in the Tower, though the weapons are discretely concealed.

One day, I asked the real El Niño Daza about the community that he had created in the Tower. He spoke in the style of a new sheriff of Dodge who had cleaned out the riffraff. “We live well here. We don’t hear gunfights all the time here. Here there’re no thugs with pistols in their hands. What there is here is work. What there is here is good people, hardworking people.” I asked Daza how he had become the Tower’s jefe. “In the beginning, everyone wanted to be the boss. But God got rid of those he wanted to get rid of and left those he wanted to leave.”

Brody, presumably, will ultimately escape from the Tower of David. But for those who actually live there, the Tower is not an entertainment but both a prison and a refuge, an armed sanctuary in a country without many rules.